BLEED LIKE ME
about
For centuries, people have used the body as a tool of self-expression, to create, to share our stories. We build, hold, shape, dance, adorn and revere. We shed grief, hold joy, express affection and be in community. Sometimes using the body as a tool to craft. Other times using the body as a vessel to transcend the present moment.
Each person’s motivation unique, yet somehow entwined with a greater experience, creating a history that only comes from connecting.
Comprised of artists who engage with the body to examine boundaries, skillfully craft, express desire, invoke spirits, play, and connect, each has a unique perspective on the body as art. Bleed Like Me is a show built on a foundation of human connection, and a desire to test the body’s limits.
Through photography, performance, installation and video, this eclectic group exhibition tells the stories of practitioners, artists, participants and communities who use radical ways of witnessing our bodies as a canvas and material to experience connection, joy, ecstasy, and altered states of consciousness.
BLEED LIKE ME
events & hours
465 Collective is located at 465 S. Van Ness, San Francisco aka Yelamu.
EVENT: Opening Reception
SATURDAY, September 5, 2026
TIME: 6 - 9pm
EVENT: Tuesdays Together
Sep 8, Sep 15, Sep 22, Sep 29
TIME: 6 - 9pm
EVENT: Gallery Hours & Performance by Xray Aims
SATURDAY, September 12, 2026
GALLERY OPENS: 12pm
BEARINGS II DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE by XRAY AIMS: 2-6pm
A performance with collaborators, using needles and stretchy string to explore physical and environmental envelopes, orientation, and its many meanings.
Xray Aims (they/them) is a multidisciplinary performance artist, a queer and disabled person, who works with collaborators in long durational pieces. These intersect art and kink in an effort to connect humans to one another, and beyond. Their work engages with beauty, pain, the built environment and the bodies. Movement, communication and the audience are key. Bearings was first explored in 2010 at Femina Potens in San Francisco and can be seen https://xrayaims.com/projects/bearings/.
You can find out more at: xrayaims.com and @xray_aims_artist
With collaborators: Mx Mayhem Mai
Mayhem (they/them) is a nonbinary trans pro dom and kink educator from SF. They specialize in ambidextrous impact topping, and build their classes at the intersection between interpersonal skills vs technical skills. More at MxMayhemMai.com.
EVENT: Kinky Sharps Quartz Art Market
SATURDAY, September 19, 2026
TIME: 2 - 6pm
Lilith Spillz is the bay's siren seductrix, queer anarchist community organizer and and recycled rubber fetish fashion designer. Upcycling popped bike tubes they create one of a kind sensual & freakishly functional items for wear, play, and power. In community they co-curate art and sexuality events, markets, parties, and exhibitions through @quartzoakland which celebrate queer self expression and desire.
EVENT: Gallery Hours & Durational Performance:
Subject/Object
SATURDAY, September 26, 2026
OPENS: 12pm
Subject/Object will create an interactive time based art project that playfully erodes the roles that often operate on either end of a lens, and the questions of ownership, artistic recognition, and intellectual property that accompany them. We will take a journey that begins with the simple presence of a body transformed by needles and cable in skilled hands, through what is observed and felt in a room bathed with intentional sound, and finally arrives at a lasting, mutualistic body of work via the imagery created by a room full of possible perspectives. The entire process will be open for viewers and photographers/videographers, with intervals of time offered for requests in art direction once the model is prepared. Attendees are encouraged to create freely from these inputs with the explicit agreement to credit all active collaborators in an ongoing acknowledgment and celebration of the understanding that we made this together.
Body by Cole Grey, piercing by Dana Dinius and Tiana McGuire, soundscape by Minus Man.
COLE GRAY is a renaissance person whose creative projects span modeling & photography, dancing, leatherwork, body modification, sex work, and producing not-for-profit renegade parties as half of Bay Area Underground with partner Minus Man. Cole is a pastry cook by trade, cat parent, introvert in real life, autistic, and sober.
TIANA MCGUIRE Conceptual artist, plant tender, professional body piercer & acupuncturist by trade. Sometimes as a catalyst, sometimes as a muse, always generating and facilitating embodied experiences. In Bleed Like Me, Tiana collaborates with Cole Grey / Dana Dinius / Minus Man in bringing subject/object into and out of this caporal experience.
BLEED LIKE ME
featuring
XRAY AIMS
Xray Aims (they/them) is a multidisciplinary performance artist who works with collaborators in long durational pieces. Their practice intersects art and kink in an effort to connect humans to one another and beyond. Their work engages beauty, pain, the built environment, and the body, with movement, communication, and audience interaction as key elements.
After the pandemic, they returned to their practice with collaborators and completed two outdoor performances in NYC at Le Petit Versailles in 2023. Since then, they have performed at two galleries in Boston. One of these, No. 97 (2024), has been developed into an installation, using a photograph from the performance, connecting two collaborators to architectural columns at Boston City Hall and Providence’s WaterFire Arts Center both in 2026.
Starting in 2003, Aims turned personal BDSM/kink practice into more performance art influence; some of this is shown in Bleed Like Me 2026. Their work has been performed and installed in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, Canada, and Europe.
They have been awarded residencies at Wedding Cake House Residencies (January 2025), Queer Family Orphanage (September 2025) and the Boston Center for the Arts Studio Residency Program (2023–2026). Their work has been supported by grants from The Puffin Foundation Ltd., the Collective Futures Fund, the A4A / MASS MoCA Capacity Building Grant, and the Mass Cultural Council Cultural Sector Recovery Grant. Xray Aims was born and lives in Boston, and earned dual bachelor’s degrees in Fine Arts and Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design.
KEVIN DONAGHY
MORE COMING SOON
ODETTE ENGLE
Odette Engle is a professional dominatrix and multimedia artist based in Oakland, CA. She works primarily in film, textile and bodies. Her piercing work explores the canvas of the crotch. Her photo work shows extreme close ups of modified genitalia, printed in risograph by her long term collaborator, Tín Rodriguez. The grain of the risograph serves to muddle the graphic nature of the photographs, making the extreme subject matter feel soft and approachable. In her video work, the body sculptures are shown in action. Needle dance displays the euphoria of body modification; Kalaya is a closeted Texan trans woman in her 70s who loves feeling her body in augmented ecstasy, bleeding free and unrestricted. Closure explores the dream of modular genitalia: Odette creates dream genitals for Kit and Kalaya.
ARVIAN HEIDIR
Arvian Heidir (b. 1971) grew up in Indonesia between two cultural worlds: a Minangkabau mother whose lineage is matrilineal, and a Javanese father shaped by a patriarchal tradition. After moving to the United States, she spent more than 25 years working in tech before turning fully to photography in 2023. Based in Sunnyvale, California, her photographs attend to the expressions and postures through which identity and belonging surface, and to the quieter negotiations of control and surrender between people. Her work has been exhibited across the San Francisco Bay Area and Monterey Bay since 2024.
The Shibari Story was made in Tokyo during a week-long immersive trip to experience and photograph Japanese photographic culture. Set in a private studio and performed by Hajime Kinoko, a shibari artist, and his collaborator, Misaki Kaneko. I captured the choreography of restraint: the stillness, the process, the quiet between two people.
Gold light against shoji screens and a hanging bamboo pole. The same light on rope and skin through the slow work of tying and untying. An upside-down figure at the culmination of the performance. Afterward: rope marks, socks, coils left on tatami.
Restraint takes time. I was more interested in what passed between them than what it becomes.
More of her work can be found at aviheidir.com and on Instagram @aviheidir.
MELANIE LEANDRO
MORE COMING SOON
FOX LYRAPHIC
Fox Lyraphic is a trans multi disciplinary artist with roots in the bay area's alternative performance scene. Combining physical theater, butoh, with costuming and sculpted leatherwork, Fox strives to create works that weave ritual with sincere vulnerability and transformational empowerment. Fox is the Creator of Suspended Resilience.
JONATHON MARSHALL
Jonathon W. Marshall is a documentary photographer dedicated to capturing the raw and transformative experiences within the body modification community. His work stands as both a visceral artistic statement and an essential historical record of the pioneers who define the modern era of body suspension. His work is defined by an intentionally high-contrast aesthetic of push-processed black-and-white film, direct flash, and high-ISO digital noise. The stark visuals mirror the tension and intensity of the acts themselves. These images, rendered in inky, glossy blacks and punctuated by high-key specular highlights, serve as permanent artifacts preserving the raw intensity of the suspension experience.
ADRIAN NIETO
Adrian Nieto is a documentary photographer based in Denver, Colorado whose work captures the physical and emotional process of flesh hook suspensions with a special focus on the pre and post processes. They’ve attended as photographer and/or suspendee with the Denver Suspension Collective, Night Heron Suspension Collective, and Ontario Suspension Collective. They’ve served as an official photographer for the 2025 Denver Suspension Retreat and 2026 Denver Suspension Convention.
Instagram: @brootlepoodle
OBSCURA NOIR
'Obscura Noir' is a queer femme (she/her) photographer based out of Dallas. With 20+ years of photography experience, she has spent the past five focusing heavily on rope suspension, hook suspension, kink, and queer spaces where art and community are found.
Her work is rooted in a lifelong fascination for documenting the strange and visceral, and sharing a passion for moments of tension and peculiarity.
To be a documentarian is to move through the world alongside weird, choosing to listen more than speak. When the moment happens, it's hoping and trusting that instinct, timing, and a small drop of skill might conspire to create something raw and honest.
JESSE SQUIRES
MORE COMING SOON
CHARI WEATHERFORD
Chari Weatherford is a ritualist, professional piercer, musician, and photographer in Ashland OR, where she has been piercing for 27 years, and owns Ritual Evolution Studio. Chari has long been called to acts of spirit in body, moments of reverence, and the gorgeous vitality of the world beyond commercial culture. This deepened personally and professionally when she met Fakir Musafar and Cleo Dubois in 2005, and the work of Spirit + Flesh ultimately gave her framework to insist on honoring the seen and unseen, the magickal, and the divine in everyday rituals and rites of passage. This is what she intends to offer her clients in studio, on stage, on the page, and out in nature. Her own participation in embodied rituals of all sorts, and in hook pulls specifically, opens doors to new realms both in and beyond the body. These rituals have been a catalyst for healing, evolution, and creative exploration. This inspires her eye when she is shooting, always following energy to capture moments of revelation, transcendence, and catharsis. She is a self-taught photographer, specializing in sacred acts, landscape, macro, and astrophotography. Her photos are inspired by the awe and beauty of nature and the world we live in, representing the wild presence of the distillation of a moment in time.
Chari can be found @ritual.evolution Upcoming Spirit + Flesh Dec 6th 2026 in S.F.
HILARY WHITMORE
Hilary Whitmore is a visionary opera singer, actress, ritualist, and the creator of Operafication, a groundbreaking performance art project that combines opera, experimental vocals, live instrumentation, movement, and ritual with the art of flesh hook suspension. Since 2003, Operafication has captivated audiences across four continents, from grand performance halls and art museums to hidden tunnels beneath train stations, Hilary explores the expressive potential of body suspension by using the suspended body as a powerful vessel for creative communication. Her work challenges conventional boundaries, blending vulnerability and strength to evoke powerful emotional responses. Whether on stage or collaborating with fellow artists, Hilary continues to push the limits of artistic expression, captivating and inspiring all who witness her work.
Hilary is drawn to blood as a performance medium because it holds a profound emotional landscape. Blood is life, coursing through the body, yet it also embodies so much more than that. It evokes grief, a reminder of deep loss, while simultaneously representing vulnerability, the rawness of what lies beneath the skin. It can be beautiful or ugly, inspiring or terrifying. It carries resilience, the undeniable proof of survival and presence.
About Witness:
Witness is a ritual performance exploring the act of witnessing. Witnessing ourselves, witnessing one another, and witnessing the transformative moments that shape us. Through hooks, experimental and classical soundscapes, blood, and ritual, the work invites the audience into a shared space where vulnerability, truth, and becoming are not merely observed, but experienced together.
LINDSEY KINCAID
curator
Lindsey Kincaid is a multidisciplinary artist and curator practicing primarily in photography, photo collage and mixed media. Born and raised in Portland Oregon, Lindsey has called Oakland, California home for the past 23 years.
Lindsey was introduced to suspension in 2004, through a group of friends in Portland Oregon, bringing her a new perspective on what it means to be present, process trauma and grief, reclaim her body and unabashedly embrace joy.
In the shuffle of life, Lindsey lost touch with the piercing community in the Pacific Northwest, later reuniting in 2025 after being introduced to Fakir’s Flesh & Spirit event. An annual tradition for her since 2023, her experiences with Flesh & Spirit have been a poignant reminder of the power of vulnerability in bleeding alongside like-minded communities. Lindsey has had the privilege of suspending, and giving and receiving support from folks in the Night Heron Collective, the Spokane Hook Rats and a multitude of hook family in the Pacific Northwest.
As an artist and curator, she strives to look at life through a curious lens, often examining themes of identity, femininity, community, growth and decay. Whether curating, taking photos on the street, or crafting projects in her home studio, Lindsey seeks to celebrate both the exquisite and the ordinary.
IG: @lkin_arts
Website: kinstudioarts.wordpress.com
Email: lkin.arts@gmail.com
QUEERLY COMPLEX
producer
Queerly Complex is the art of relating to one’s self, each other, and the Cosmic Mysteries through contemplation, curiosity, conversation, and co-creation. This results in: art, performance, poetry, & media; gatherings, happenings, exchanges, workshops, & events; collaborations, collectives, commons, and co-productions.
Queerly Complex is also Jason Wyman, and I was born upon the Land of 10,000 Lakes, also called mní sóta home of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ. I now lives, creates, and loves upon Yelamu, lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, renamed by colonizers Yerba Buena, then San Francisco. My name means, “Healer,” or so I've been told. What it means to me is, “Someone eternally and perpetually finding their way.”
I am an artist rooted in queer traditions of familial bonding with those not of one’s blood, of moving to cultivate belonging, of remixing identity and gender and sexuality to become and continue becoming.
I am a Co-Founder of Tree of Change praxis with Crystal Mason, a founding member of 465 Collective, a Board Member of People Power Media, a Steering Committee member of the San Francisco People's Budget Coalition, and a founder and contributor to Culture Tending Commons.
IG: @QueerlyComplex
www.queerlycomplex.com www.treeofchange.net www.culturetending.com
